Picking This Back Up

This blog started more than a decade ago under a different name, Kariobangi, during my PhD fieldwork in Nairobi. At the time, I was trying to understand how small industrial workshops operated, how informal entrepreneurs built things with few resources, and how they navigated fragile markets. That experience left a lasting impression on how I think about development, risk, and the role of institutions and systems.

If you are seeing this post, it is probably because you subscribed to the blog years ago. If so, thank you. I have always loved when long-quiet blogs from the heyday of development blogging suddenly come back to life, with authors returning to share another decade of experience and perspective (Who doesnt secretly hope Chris Blattman’s blog makes a full comeback!). This is a much narrower version of that, a personal space to reconnect with some of the questions that first brought me into this work.

The questions that motivated that early writing are still with me, but the language has changed. Today I find myself working on how small firms navigate the digital systems that increasingly organize economic activity. As software moves from informing decisions to acting on behalf of people and businesses, questions of power, risk, accountability, and participation become design choices embedded in everyday markets.

The field I once entered through the lens of microenterprise and informality now stretches into digital systems, policy design, and the mechanics of economic coordination at scale. But the underlying concern remains surprisingly consistent.

At the core, I am still interested in the same things. How people build. How they make use of markets and tools, digital, financial, or otherwise, to create opportunity. How they manage risk when systems are incomplete, unreliable, or changing. And how small decisions, taken under constraint, shape larger patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and resilience.

This blog newsletter is a way to write through some of those questions. Some posts may draw on fieldwork, others on policy debates, technological shifts, or research I am part of. Some may be unfinished thoughts or small provocations, especially as new systems like AI evolve faster than our frameworks to govern them. I do not know yet how frequently I will post. I simply want a space to share notes, think in public, outside of institutional formats.

The archive from the old blog remains. It reminds me where this all started.

Thanks for reading. If you are here, you probably share some of these questions. I am glad you are here.